


now this i can do

by lobster_emoji



Category: Tron (Movies), Tron - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, a stupid ending there turned serious when thought about in depth, originally inspired by that choose ur own adventure book, sam gets trapped on the grid and becomes a games program, the 'tron is orange by choice' au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:54:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24096922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lobster_emoji/pseuds/lobster_emoji
Summary: What if Clu had a better sales pitch? What if Tron went orange by choice? How would the Grid change? And what happens when a young User drops in on perfection?Or, the AU where Sam comes around to seeing it Clu's way, and gets comfortable in a new role as Lightcycle Grid Champion.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 18





	now this i can do

The dusty desk is suddenly pristine, Sam notices. 

The countdown is gone, the command prompts and system history is gone, it’s just a smooth unbroken sheet of black glass. Also gone, he sees, are the bulletin boards covered with his father’s hand-scrawled notes, the laser setup, filing cabinets and bookshelves, and the well-worn couch. The light, even, has changed from the familiar yellow of the streetlights into a cold blue. 

Something is wrong. Something has changed. The roar of engines overhead only confirms it.

Sam bursts through the front doors into the empty street; the buildings aren’t the dilapidated, graffiti-covered ones he passed on the way into the arcade, but clean towers lit at the edges in blue panels, stretching up to a dizzying height, literally scraping the sky—which, by the sound of it, is now filled with thunderclouds. 

“This isn’t happening,” he mutters. A spotlight switches onto him from above, and Sam turns to run, but the street’s dropped away from him in hexagonal blocks. _I’m fucked,_ Sam thinks. “Oh man, this is happening,” he says aloud.

A ship of some sort lands—and as the light in his eyes goes away, he recognizes the Recognizers of his childhood, blown up a thousand times to tower above him. 

Two strange men in helmets and orange-lit clothes march off the Recognizer with staffs in hand and discs strapped to their back. “This program has no disc. Another stray,” one of the guards says as they grab him by the arms and manhandle him around to check his back. 

“Hey, hey, _wait_! Wait! I’m not a program!” Sam protests loudly, but he is only bodily shoved into an open slot on board the recognizer. He looks around frantically as the guards retreat to their posts on either side of the passenger bay and takes stock. There are a lot of empty spots, and the few programs there are either staring ahead stoically, in acceptance of their fate, or scared shitless. 

Sam would really like to know what that fate is. But he knows one thing about where he is, though he refused to accept it until now: “He actually did it. I’m on the Grid.”

He tries an idea. “Does the name Kevin Flynn mean anything to you?” He asks the nearest program, yelling over the wind. 

The program turns his head to face Sam; he’s got a wild, frenzied look in his eyes. “Shut up! Shut up, if you have any sense of self-preservation! Users, they’ll get us both for that—”

Sam looks ahead once more, blood running cold. What in god’s name has he gotten himself into? 

The recognizer comes to a halt at the base of a large building; it’s got an open roof, tapering up from a wide base, and spotlights turn and spin back and forth into the clouds. They’re set down, and one of the guards steps up to the prisoner— _computer program_ —farthest to Sam’s left. The guard makes a noise almost like a scan, and then speaks one simple word: “Rectify.”

The program lets out a sigh of relief. So that’s the good option then.

The next program comes up and is judged. “Games,” the guard says. 

“No, no, _no,”_ the program says. _Poor bastard,_ Sam thinks as he’s dragged off the recognizer—and then he backhands a guard’s face, breaks free, and makes a run for it—

He jumps over the edge, and Sam’s heart falls just as fast as he does.

 _Oh my god, did he just commit suicide?_ Sam thinks. The guard walks up to him, cursorily declares, “Games,” and Sam freezes. “Wh-what?” 

He’s dragged off, too paralyzed by fear to think of a similar escape until his feet are strapped back into another set of restraints. 

The restraints keep him down as the platform rushes down into the ground, and Sam’s quickly set in place, alone in a darkened chamber.

The whirring sounds of machinery comes from four angles, and a set of thin lines of light appears in both of the ones Sam can see. It’s orange, a fiery orange burning in the darkness, matching the guards on the recognizer, unlike his pale blue and the blues of all the other prisoners. 

Sam’s terrified of what it entails, wondering wildly what’s in the darkness, when the clicks of hard shoes comes out of the dark and the lights come up. Four women in skintight white and orange bodysuits and wolfish gazes, sizing him up like prey as he wriggles helplessly in his restraints. 

They stalk up to him, and pause. Sam doesn’t say anything. 

One lifts her finger, and the tip erupts into a bright light—cutting laser? Fire? _Oh god what are they going to do to me,_ he thinks frantically.

They begin cutting his clothes away, and the fear blends with confusion.

Then they begin outfitting him in armor, and it makes more sense. He appreciates some protection, but from _what?_

He’s given a disc. He feels his memory expand. He feels its potential. 

He’s wordlessly sent ahead, except for a word from one of the women in white: “ _Survive._ ”

Survive it is. 

He enters some sort of small compartment. An elevator. It lifts him back up along with around fifteen programs in varying shades of blue and green: they’re all prisoners, then?

They’re in a stadium. Thousands upon thousands, maybe even millions of programs are out there, cheering and jeering in tune with each other. About half of them are orange-lit, the remaining no doubt blues and green that haven’t done anything noticeably wrong.

He’s set up in a compartment opposite another program in blue. They instantly adopt a defensive stance and pull their disc from their back, a helmet forming around their head. 

_Survive,_ the woman’s word from below echoes through his head, along with his father’s from years ago: _There were these disc battles, fought in spectacular arenas._

The disc is hurtling for his head, and he flings himself to the side. It rebounds off two walls and flies back into the other program’s hands. 

“Oh no you don’t,” Sam mutters, and pulls his own disc from his back. He tosses it with as much precision as he can, but the other program effortlessly dodges. Their disc rockets toward him, and he steps back—but it hits the floor between his feet and a hexagon of glass flooring explodes into cubes and he begins to fall.

Sam catches himself, and pulls himself up, just in time to have to fling his disc forward and himself to the side once more to avoid another floor-shattering hit. 

The program takes a flying leap across the gap separating them, and Sam has a brilliant idea right as his disc returns to his hand. He shatters the floor himself right where the other program was set to land, and they shatter into cubes themselves as they plummet through the air. 

Sam’s heart is racing, adrenaline coursing through him. He won, which he screams at the top of his lungs. On the other hand, he just killed a man. A program, yes, but he _killed_ a man. His exhilaration is declared for the whole arena to hear in an attempt to shove down that disgust. “I won!” he yells again. “Now let me out!”

As his compartment moves and the floor fills itself back in, he realizes the number of programs—16—is set up for a tournament. He’s got to fight his way to the win. Kill three more. 

_Fuck this,_ he thinks. “Yeah, I’m out,” he says as the program across from him does a flip and a spin and settles into a defensive stance. They throw their disc, and, running at them, Sam blocks it and slides into the gap.

The voxels rain down on him from above as he hangs by one hand from the game compartment, and Sam shivers, but he waits for the one below to spin underneath him. It does, and Sam lets go, free falling to the lower battle’s ceiling. He runs for it, and flings himself onto the next one down. It’s a bad landing, though, and he slides off the side, fingers scrabbling for purchase the glass surface won’t let him have. There’s one more compartment below him, though. Rising from the floor, bigger than the rest, no one in it Sam can see. He lets himself fall into it, rolling to a stop, and stands as the noise in the arena rises. There’s a chime. 

_Final Round Initiated._

Sam sees it now. Beat three other programs, win the tournament, face the final boss. And Sam speedran the game. 

A helmeted program in—you guessed it, orange—steps up to the center of the ring, and raises his hands. The crowd screams their head off as the other programs above them sink back below the arena floor, and they raise up into the air. No escape now.

The program up top has four squares displayed prominently on his chest in the same blazing orange as before, nagging at Sam’s memory. He lets his helmet click off, spinning around with his arms still held in the air, facing all the programs. He’s got a tuft of unruly brown hair squished down beneath the helmet. 

Finally he turns back to face Sam, face set in a sneer with teeth exposed, almost as if he’s ready to pounce on Sam and rip his throat out that way, and Sam goes cold. He takes a few steps back.

“A-Alan?” Sam blurts out, unable to help himself, because the program in front of him bears the much younger face of his mentor and father figure, contorted into a horrible, twisted mask of condescension and reined-in bloodlust.

The crowd begins chanting: “Tron! Tron! Tron! Tron!”, and Sam knows it’s so much worse, when Tron _snarls_ , becoming even angrier, and points one dramatic finger down at Sam. “You keep that name out of your mouth,” Tron says. “ _He_ is not spoken of on _this_ system.”

Sam wonders if he even can wet his pants on the Grid. He thinks it’s a no; if he could, surely he would have done it by now out of fear.

Tron takes a step farther away from Sam, presents himself to the crowd again, and then does an elaborate series of flips. 

Sam’s got no doubt he’s about to be back in the fight, and grasps his disc just a little bit tighter, heart beating out of his chest. 

Tron finishes his opening sequence, and the crowd roars as he splits his disc in _two,_ and launches a salvo towards Sam. 

Sam neatly angles his body to the side, dodging the discs, and throws his own right for Tron’s head, guts twisting as he does, but to his simultaneous relief, frustration, and _awe,_ Tron pulls off an insane flip, twisting sideways in the air, sending the disc flying just underneath his body. Tron lands, catches his discs, and lets Sam’s rocket back toward him. 

An alarm sounds. An arrow on the ceiling blinks, turning in place, and Tron turns, running with superhuman speed at the wall. Sam cocks his head in confusion, and the world upends itself around him. 

Trained from BASE jumps and parkour in the past, Sam contorts himself to match the new gravity and lands smoothly, rolling into a standing position just in time for Tron to throw himself at Sam, discs blazing. 

Sam’s still far from his element, but this is a bit closer to it. He parries discs with his own and lets the martial arts muscle memory flow through him; he’s almost holding his own. Tron catches his eye and the fire contained within them makes him falter, just long enough for Tron’s disc to slice his arm open. Sam shouts in pain, clutching his arm, and Tron kicks him in the chest,, sliding back across the ceiling. He pushes himself back up, and the alarm sounds again. Tron takes off running for the wall again. 

Sam pushes off the ceiling this time, and lands neatly in a crouch on the floor, but Tron’s not where Sam was expecting him to be. He turns, and Tron is staring down at him from above, flying through the air feet first. 

Sam’s face gets a boot planted in it, and he goes down hard. 

He’s breathing hard, as well, with a disc buzzing at his throat. Tron kneels over him, ready to make the killing blow, when his eyes flick to the side. Sam’s side. His _arm._

Tron’s face morphs further, into a sort of disgusted shock. “ _User,_ ” he says, almost fighting to keep the awe from bleeding into his voice. Sam can hear it.

Tron drags him to his feet, and marches him forward to face the golden emperor’s booth near the top of the arena. Tron’s face is right in his ear. He’s not breathing hard at all. He’s barely broken a sweat. Kicked Sam across the arena and back and it’s just another Tuesday.

“Program, identify yourself,” A voice sounds from above.

Sam suddenly has a bad feeling. “Like hell I will,” he spits, summoning a bravery he’s only just mustered from the way Tron spared him for his blood.

“Identify,” demands a deeper, modulated voice. Sam falters, but still manages to cry out, “Ask me yourself. In person.”

The voice cuts out, but Tron’s helmet flicks up. A voice sounds inside it, tinny like a phone call. “Bring him to me,” Sam can just barely make out. _So I can punish him for his insolence,_ Sam fills in, and regrets his choice to fight back.

Sam still goes, willingly or unwillingly even he isn’t sure, to see the wizard. The program in charge is a striking figure in a long black coat cut in yellow glowing trim. Sam hasn’t seen yellow yet. He thinks it’s this guy’s trademark.

The program turns to face Sam, and lets his helmet click back.

“Dad?” Sam breathes. 

“Dad?” the man says, bewildered. “Sam Flynn?”

“You’re not _Kevin_ Flynn,” Sam spits. “Dad would have recognized me. Hugged me after twenty years apart. _You_ must be Clu.”

“Well, I suppose that metaphorical cat is out of the bag,” Clu says. “So we have a User in our midst. I had figured, what with the opening of the portal.” He mutters to himself, “I suppose it’s a good thing the _Rectifier_ is just about ready for deployment.”

“The what now?” Sam says, loudly.

Tron stiffens behind Sam. “Everyone out, _now!_ ” Tron barks. “That means you, Jarvis.”

A number of programs awkwardly file out, and Sam is alone with what may very well be the two most important—and dangerous—programs on the Grid. 

“You’ll help me, _Sam,_ ” Clu sneers. “The Grid… I secured complete control over it cycles ago. I crave… more. But the portal closes in a millicycle; Flynn once told me that equates to about eight User hours inside the Grid, and more importantly it can only be opened _from the outside._ And now that the portal is open—”

“What, you’re gonna march out into the world of the Users and invade there?” Sam says. A hysterical laugh bubbles up out of him. “You’re fucking crazy. Haven’t you ever heard of the law of conservation of matter? Do you even have DNA?”

“The what?” Tron says, kicking Sam in the back of the knees. Sam falls to the floor with a grunt. “What are you talking about?”

“I could give you three big reasons that plan won’t work,” Sam says. “Maybe four.”

“And they are?” Clu says. “”I welcome your input.”

Sam sputters. “It’s basic fucking science, man, I learned this shit when I was twelve. We didn’t put a whole bunch of atoms in the Grid, so there can only be about two people’s worth of atoms coming out. The material everything is made of? It’s all just energy in here but we need matter out there. Secondly even if you _tried_ to bring one program out how would it even put them together? You don’t have DNA! My pattern’s stored, it’s only me or Dad that could get out intact and alive. Third, do you have any idea how _big_ the User world is? How many programs are on the Grid right now? Millions? There’s seven _billion_ Users. And to top it all off, even if you miraculously got your whole army out there alive, your fancy ships and discs probably wouldn’t even work on anything!” He suddenly stops his tirade, breathing hard. 

“Thank you for your insights, Sam,” Clu says, and Sam’s heart drops into his stomach. _Oh, god, I_ helped _this maniac._ He flinches back from Clu as best as he can while still kneeling on the floor, and bumps into Tron’s legs behind him. 

Tron grins down at him, all teeth, and firmly puts his hands on Sam’s shoulders. Sam shudders; he isn’t going anywhere. 

“We can’t exactly let our dear guest _go,_ now can we?” Clu asks aloud, looking at Tron. Sam’s heart speeds up, and he stifles his gasp of fear. “If he gets back out into the User world he could shut the Grid down in a microcycle. Delete me, and you, and destroy the perfection and order we’ve created here.”

“What do you suggest?” Tron asks, one hand leaving Sam’s shoulder and going for his disc. Sam trembles as the edge comes to rest right next to his neck. 

“Put him in a cell,” Clu declares. Sam slumps in relief even as Tron grabs him by the armpits and hauls him to his feet. Tron spins him around and walks him to the door, and as they go Clu calls out to Tron: “On the east side of the city. Something with a view.”

Tron huffs, a pleased grin on his face. “As you wish, my Luminary,” he says, too much satisfaction in his voice. 

Tron may be Clu’s enforcer, but he’s apparently dedicated enough to see to Sam’s imprisonment himself. Sam doesn’t dare try anything.

He’s thrown in the cell unceremoniously, and the last thing he sees before the door slides shut with a click is the disdainful face of Tron looking down on the pitiful User who failed to get away.

The next six hours crawl by, second by agonizing second. Sam tries to sleep, but the hard bench in the cell doesn’t let him. He spins his disc around his finger, looks through the files, and stares out the cell window Clu made sure he has.

The view of the rocky outlands is lit by the bright star in the sky, and as Sam stares out at it, it fizzles out of existence. Sam’s eyes widen in terror. Has it been—?

Sam tries to count it up: though the last few have been stretched out, it _has_ been about eight. “The _portal,_ ” he says. “Oh god.”

He’s trapped here, just like his Dad. He’s disappeared, just like his Dad. Alan will only find his bike parked in front of the arcade as the last remnant of Sam Flynn. Who’ll take care of Marvin?

Sam is a permanent resident of the digital world, now. The dread returns.

On the other side of the city, deep in the western outlands, another Flynn watches the portal extinguish at the same moment. He’s also in solitary confinement, _this_ cell lavishly furnished but still a prison of his own making. His only companions were derezzed hundreds of cycles before, and the sorrow that weighs on him now is heavier than anything he’s felt before. Someone else has come to the Grid, and based off the timing of the portal’s disappearance, they’re just as trapped as he is. 

He hasn’t had incentive to leave the hideout in so incredibly long. Now that the portal has gone, he still doesn’t. But he feels for the other User stuck in here with him—and whoever they are, they’re with Clu.

He’s got the better deal between the two of them. 

Kevin Flynn can only hope the poor soul isn’t his son.


End file.
